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arXiv · 1205.0363

Accretion, Growth of Supermassive Black Holes, and Feedback in Galaxy Mergers

Li-Xin Li
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Abstract

Super-Eddington accretion is very efficient in growing the mass of a black hole: in a fraction of the Eddington time its mass can grow to an arbitrary large value if the feedback effect is not taken into account. However, since super-Eddington accretion has a very low radiation efficiency, people have argued against it as a major process for the growth of the black holes in quasars since observations have constrained the average accretion efficiency of the black holes in quasars to be $\ga 0.1$. In this paper we show that the observational constraint does not need to be violated if the black holes in quasars have undergone a two-phase growing process: with a short super-Eddington accretion process they get their masses inflated by a very large factor until the feedback process becomes important, then with a prolonged sub-Eddington accretion process they have their masses increased by a factor $\ga 2$. The overall average efficiency of this two-phase process is then $\ga 0.1$, and the existence of black holes of $10^9 M_\odot$ by redshift 6 is easily explained. Observational test of the existence of the super-Eddington accretion phase is briefly discussed.

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Li-Xin Li. 2012-05-02. Accretion, Growth of Supermassive Black Holes, and Feedback in Galaxy Mergers. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2012.21336.x

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